Research In Motion offers free premium apps to customers following service interruptions

Press Release

Research In Motion Offers Free Premium Apps to Customers Following Service Interruptions

Waterloo, ON - Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) announced today that a selection of premium apps worth a total value of more than US $100 will be offered free of charge to subscribers as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions. The apps will be made available to customers over the coming weeks on BlackBerry® App World™ and will continue to be available until December 31, 2011.*

“Our global network supports the communications needs of more than 70 million customers,” said RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. “We truly appreciate and value our relationship with our customers.  We’ve worked hard to earn their trust over the past 12 years, and we’re committed to providing the high standard of reliability they expect, today and in the future.”

The complete selection of premium apps will become available to download at BlackBerry App World over a period of four weeks beginning Wednesday, October 19th.  The selections over this period will include the following (with more to come):

RIM’s enterprise customers will also be offered one month of free Technical Support.  Current customers will be offered a complimentary one month extension of their existing Technical Support contract, and customers who do not currently have a Technical Support contract will be offered a one month trial of RIM’s BlackBerry Technical Support Services - Enhanced Support, free of charge.  Additional details about the program and information about how to register will be available at www.blackberry.com/enterpriseoffer.

“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” added Lazaridis. “We have apologized to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence.  We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.

 

* Please note that the availability of this offer will depend on the type of device, operating system version, access to BlackBerry App World and local conditions and/or restrictions.  

About Research In Motion

Research In Motion (RIM), a global leader in wireless innovation, revolutionized the mobile industry with the introduction of the BlackBerry® solution in 1999. Today, BlackBerry products and services are used by millions of customers around the world to stay connected to the people and content that matter most throughout their day. Founded in 1984 and based in Waterloo, Ontario, RIM operates offices in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. RIM is listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market (NASDAQ: RIMM) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RIM). For more information, visit www.rim.com or www.blackberry.com.

Part-Time Scientists looking to take QNX to the moon

When RIM invested into QNX it wasn't just for their BlackBerry Tablet OS. As has been noted many times, QNX has been around for quite some time and is found in many places today -- from cars, elevators, medical instruments and even defense and security applications. RIM knew this and has no intentions of disrupting QNX's current operations. In fact, it's something that is often overlooked when referring to RIM and their recent dramatic demise headlines. QNX was an investment for RIM that extends well beyond the BlackBerry Tablet OS space. Apparently everyone forgot that QNX was quite a profitable company on it's own and they are now a part of RIM.

Now, a group named The Part-Time Scientists is hoping to take QNX to the moon with their entry into the Google Lunax X Challenge.  QNX's role here? The Part-Time Scientists have chosen QNX as the OS their rover "Asimov" will run due to it's strengths in real time operations. They've been working on the robot in their spare time in hopes to claim a portion of the $20 million prize for landing their rover on the moon and have it send information back to earth. That prize, jumps to $30 million if the rover survives the extreme conditions of the moon and can capture images of the Apollo landing site. Needless to say, we wish them all the best on their mission -- they're currently among the top 5 of the 30 entrants that are most likely to succeed on their mission and that alone is something to be proud of.

Visit The Part-Time Scientists website for more info

Source: On Q - The QNX Blog

When Jim met Mike

The Co-CEO team at Research In Motion is a bit unusual. Very few companies try the multiple-CEO route; even fewer of them actually succeed. The two Co-CEO's of RIM, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsille form two halves of a whole. Each of them complements the strengths of the other. As Jim characterizes, "My job is to get the money. Mike's job is to spend it. "

When Mike and Jim met, it perhaps wasn't under the best of terms. Around 1990, Research In Motion had been doing a bang-up, awesome job on making control cards for Sutherland-Schultz. The cards simulated the conditions on an assembly line and let operators see how a new machine would function before actually installing it on the line. Sutherland-Schultz bought so many of the cards that RIM's annual revenue exceeded $1 million for the first time.

That's when Sutherland-Schultz decided perhaps it would be cheaper to just buy RIM rather than the cards. Of course, Mike L. would hear none of it; but he still came in to listen to what his biggest customer had to say. Jim Balsille, a vice president with Sutherland-Schultz, was brought in to make the happen. It was during these negations that Lazaridis came to respect Balsille. Mike came to a conclusion, he wanted Balsillie join RIM as a partner. Jim said no.

 

 

As you may have guessed, Sutherland-Shultz did not buy RIM, and thankfully only a short time passed before James Basillie, Chartered Accountant, graduate of the University of Toronto and the Harvard Graduate School of Business, joined the company. Investing $125,000 of his own money, Jim soon owned a third of Research In Motion.

Mike Lazaridis' role in the company is generally to make and innovate new technological products. Jim Basillie's role is generally to focus on getting the money to do so. Jim accounting background and business acumen helped RIM become the company it is today. It was Jim that found the financing needed to keep a fledgling company afloat. It was Jim who successfully took the company public, trading on the stock exchanges as RIMM.

And it all happened because Jim's company wanted to buy Mike's company.

Further Explanation on Why we are Waiting Sooo Long for BlackBerry 7 Smartphones to be Released

Reflecting upon Thursday evening's RIM Q1 Results and earnings call, the pieces finally fell into place so we can more accurately tell the story of why it is taking so long for RIM to bring the BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930 and other next-generation BlackBerry Smartphones to market.

On the historic call, which featured both Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis delivering the results commentary and tag teaming the Q&A period, the following was what Mike had to offer in regards to the lull in new BlackBerry phones:

We were already well down a development path to the next-generation BlackBerry handsets when we realized that in the US the features and performance arms race demanded that we upgrade the chipset and port BlackBerry to a higher-performance platform. This was an engineering change that affected hardware and software timelines and pushed out entry into carrier certification labs.

It's only two short sentences, but if you've followed the BlackBerry development path for a few years there's a lot you can gather from them. Specifically, Mike is saying that devices like the new BlackBerry Bold 9900 at their design inception were not originally intended to get the 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset that they are going to launch with. That makes sense considering we've been hearing about devices like Magnum and Onyx III since before that chipset even existed.

From what I've gathered, RIM was originally going to continue to use Marvell for at least one more generation of their top of the line GSM BlackBerry Smartphones, bumping up from the current 624MHz found in devices like the Bold 9780 to 800MHz likely via the Tavor MG-1 (and on the CDMA side going with something like the Qualcomm MSM 8655 800GHz). With RIM typically having a pretty big lead time on their device development cycle, the progression from 624MHz up to 800MHz fits the way they have rolled out platform upgrades over the years.

But someone at somepoint in recent months must have woken up one morning and realized that 800MHz would be laughable in their top tier devices compared to the onslaught of high-end specs being ushered in by Android phones, so relegated 800MHz to the low end (BlackBerry apollo/sedona - the new Curve) and realized they needed to do something more compelling for their flagship devices. With Marvell's offerings looking lackluster compared to Qualcomm's, for RIM that meant a big undertaking relatively late in the commercialization cycle of these new devices as they would be abandoning Marvell.

RIM has always treated the development of their GSM and CDMA devices independently, as the devices were on different chipsets. Just think back over the years as to how GSM and CDMA BlackBerry devices would launch at different times and even physically look different (think Bold 9650 and Bold 9700) and could have significantly different performance. For CDMA, RIM would just license Qualcomm's radio stack, but on the GSM side RIM wrote their own - one of the reasons why that Bold 9700/9780 has always gotten such awesome battery life as RIM maintains finite control over the part that can eat the battery away quickly. Again wanting to maintain control over their radio stacks, this late change to Qualcomm meant RIM having to re-write that code for the new chipset, and in doing so, must then go through the technical acceptance process with carriers all over again. That again explains why on the call Mike said this is some of the best code they've written to date, and that why once one devices gets approved it should move quick from there (it probably also explains why RIM is pretty confident the smaller 1230mAh battery in the 9900 will still get good battery life - they're killing it with the code). Now having only one chipset to worry about for both GSM and CDMA will definitely speed things up for RIM down the road once they get through the process one.

Beyond the radio side, RIM would also would have had to put a ton of time into adapting the BlackBerry OS for some of the other features offered by the new chipset, like the dedicated GPU which RIM is tapping into to power what they have dubbed as "liquid graphics." Yet another reason for the delays, which I'll save for another article to dive into, could be the fact RIM forgot about phones for a little bit while they worked around the clock to push out the PlayBook.

Thinking back to when I first went hands on with the new touch Bold at BlackBerry World in May, I pretty much felt that was a device that RIM could put on sale right then and there (and I probably would have bought ten). Sure, it still had a few little bugs, but it felt ready enough for me. After yesterday's earnings call, I get the sense that it's ready enough for RIM too at this point, but they just need to finish getting through this TA process yet again. 

So if you're reading this and happen to work for a carrier in the T.A. department and test this stuff out, do CrackBerry Nation a favor and approve it fast! I want my BlackBerry Bold 9900 aready!